Clustering of search trajectory and its application to parameter tuning

This paper is concerned with automated classification of Combinatorial Optimization Problem instances for instance-specific parameter tuning purpose. We propose the CluPaTra Framework, a generic approach to CLUster instances based on similar PAtterns according to search TRAjectories and apply it on parameter tuning. The key idea is to use the search trajectory as a generic feature for clustering problem instances. The advantage of using search trajectory is that it can be obtained from any local-search based algorithm with small additional computation time. We explore and compare two different search trajectory representations, two sequence alignment techniques (to calculate similarities) as well as two well-known clustering methods. We report experiment results on two classical problems: Travelling Salesman Problem and Quadratic Assignment Problem and industrial case study. Journal of the Operational Research Society (2013) 64, 1742–1752. doi:10.1057/jors.2012.167 Published online 13 February 2013